Winged terror arrives and strips the episodes writer to the bone.
Synopsis
A golfer is attacked from the sky and his body is found surgically stripped of flesh.
Cutter and Stephen are called in. Claudia expresses to him that Lester thinks he’s more of a hindrance than a help and that he needs to be more cooperative and helpful, as she can see Lester’s point.
They search for the anomaly and find it in the air.
Meanwhile, Conner, who has been rooming with Abby, accidentally lets Rex, the coelurosauravus from the first episode, escape from Abby’s apartment, where they’ve been hiding him from Lester’s people. Rex, through a staggering improbability, escapes, but finds his way into the car Conner is driving and then makes no noise at all until Conner arrives at the scene of the latest anomaly. Presumably, up to this point, he wanted to follow Conner, but now he wants to go away.
While Conner chases Rex on the golf course, a giant (and I do mean giant) pteranodon menaces Cutter and then goes after Connor.
Conner’s life looks to be almost over so Claudia orders the SAS to shoot the pteranodon against Cutter’s wishes. At the last moment, Cutter knocks Capt. Ryan’s arm and causes him to miss.
Claudia has reached the crisis point in her relationship with Cutter. Does she side with him, or with Lester? It looks increasingly like she’ll have to side with Lester.
Using some unlikely technology, they locate the pteranodon on a nearby building. Using a red flag and tranquilizer dart, Cutter and Stephen bring down the pteranodon but in the process it knocks Claudia unconscious.
She awakens back at the golf course hotel with a mild concussion and unable to see. In her confusion, she knocks over some blood which both she and the medic step in.
Abby and Conner have been searching for Rex, but when they find him, they also find a flock of anurognathus.
Stephen, doing Laura Dern’s classic Jurrasic Park moment one better, analyzes the pteranodon’s dung by tasting it. He concludes that the pteranodon never eats mammals, just reptiles. (Stephen is amazing, he can determine what types of higher-order life a carnivore eats just by tasting its shit. Hat’s off to the maestro. I’d have trouble differentiating undigested iguana from ferret. I certainly won’t try to emulate his talent.)
The anurognathus attack the medic and kill him. Cutter and Claudia are trapped in the hotel as the creatures try to get at her. In her panic, she slips in the blood and really rolls around in it for a while, getting herself all tasty for the anurognathus.
Unable to call for help, Cutter goes to the ambulance to get help. He makes a torch out of a small bottle of oxygen and a lighter and creeps back to the hotel, torching anurognathus as he goes.
Claudia, still mostly blind, has been holding the critters off with a golf club. (She chooses an iron, I think I would have gone with a wood for this particular lie.) Her time is running out when, out of the blue, Helen Cutter shows up and saves her by blowing the place (and all the anurognathus) up. Helen then disappears.
Cutter then lures the pteranodon back into the anomaly, which immediately disappears.
Analysis
More than any other this series, this episode wrankles my jaw. I can live with the series’ problems with misidentifying dinosaurs, impossible technology, technical inaccuracies and even the fact that they don’t have enough scenes with Abby running around in her panties but I will not tolerate when a writer is so lame that he cannot advance the story without relying on horribly contrived coincidence.
I was moderately annoyed when Rex escapes and then proceeds to fly into the car with Conner, without Conner noticing during the entire drive.
I was very annoyed when Claudia wakes up after a concussion. She’s the only person in this little “field hospital†and she’s just been knocked out. She’s not lost blood, and she’s not hooked up to a whole blood IV. Somehow, still, she manages to clumsily get out of bed, knock over an IV unit of blood (why is it there?) and step on it, getting blood all over the place and all the characters in peril. (Blood being the attractant for the anurognathus.)
If that’s not sloppy enough writing to get your blood boiling, Claudia’ temporary blindness, rendering her helpless, ought to be more than enough.
The coup de gras has to be the final four-part coincidence: The military, who are supposedly keeping the place cordoned off are nowhere nearby, Cutter’s cell phone battery dies, Claudia’s is out in the car and a random anurognathus somehow manages to fly right up to the building’s phone line and cuts it.
It’s that kind of sloppy writing that makes everyone think they can be a TV writer, too.
This episode was the lightest piece of fluff in the series and doesn’t bear much analysis. The only points of note are the surprise “good guy†actions of Helen’s and the developing relationship between Cutter and Claudia. Just when we thought we had her figured out as the bad guy, perhaps she’s not so bad afterall. How will she react when she discovers Claudia and Cutter are getting friendly – or perhaps that’s why she did save Claudia’s life?
Since there is a general lack of things to mention, I’ll use this opportunity to discuss a couple things about the series in general that are worth noting.
Having come to the end of episode 5, and with episode 6 apparently being about a creature from the future we’ve apparently exhausted the collection of prehistoric animals for this series. It’s interesting to note that not one single creature in this series was a dinosaur.
I’ve already discussed the frustration at the first episode’s mammal-like reptiles being repeatedly misidentified as dinosaurs. It’s forgivable for a layman because, for example, dimetrodon (which was not in this series) is included in practically every package of toy dinosaurs made in the last 40 years. (If you’re reading this, just take out a dimetrodon figure and place him next to triceratops, stegosaurus or any other four-legged dinosaur and then look at his legs. Dinosaurs hold their legs under their bodies like modern mammals do. Dimetrodon and his kin splay their legs out like modern lizards and crocodilians do.)
Episodes 2 and 4 featured insects and birds (dodos) which, to my knowledge, no one confuses for dinosaurs.
Episode 3 featured a mosasaur which, like plesiosaurs and icythyosaurs were, although contemporaneous to dinosaurs were marine reptiles (Euryapsids and Diapsids).
Episode 5 featured pterosaurs which, like the marine reptiles, are contemporaries of the dinosaurs, but are of the extinct flying reptiles.
I, for one, find this really cool. While dinosaurs certainly fired the imagination of many a child (myself included), they are but one facet of the amazing tapestry of life on this planet. In high school, I spent a lot of time at the public library, pouring over the paleontology books (now horribly out-of-date, to be sure.) and I found myself fascinated by the under-represented creatures, the pre- and post-dinosaur eras of life. Easily-digestible information for the general public has been scarce and, to the best of my knowledge, remained completely under the radar until the BBC’s Walking with Beasts and Walking with Monsters.
It seems likely that Primeval has intentionally avoiding using dinosaurs so they could focus on some of the less over-exposed creatures from the past. (Seriously, one more Tyrannosaur or Velociraptor attack and I’d go postal.) However, if the effort was intentional, would they have made the mix-up in the first episode? Wouldn’t they, over the course of the series, made some mention of the whole dinosaur/not dinosaur thing? Even if only to show how clever they were? I realize Primeval is not meant to be an educational show, but a certain amount of information imparted to the viewers can be appropriate.
Here’s the second thing that really rubs me wrong about this show. Where did they get these scientists from? These anomalies are perhaps the single most significant discovery of all time. They have profound impact on physics as we understand it and inestimable value in terms of research into the past. Eras of time that we’ve only been able to paint a picture of through trace evidence are in front of them. How can these people not do even the most basic of investigation?
Did anyone pop their head through an anomaly and even do so much as to snap a photograph? Videotape? Take air, water and soil samples? They found Helen Cutter’s camera and all it had were snapshots of her. How amazingly self-centered and scientifically disinterested is she?
There’s a school of thought represented by what’s called the Butterfly Effect that says, in effect, if we were able to travel in time, even a tiny change could directly or, more likely, indirectly alter the causal links leading to our present reality. That leads us to that whole, “could you go back in time and prevent Hitler’s birth thereby averting WWII?†dilemma. It’s a philosophical mess, but, it’s not too great of a leap to say that, given that time portals open into the past, it might be prudent to tread very cautiously. (And, as everyone knows by now, the Time Lords aren’t around to sort it all out anymore.)
If Cutter and his team are working on that assumption, it’s not been mentioned. Nonetheless, they’ve killed creatures from the past (possibly altering some predator/prey situation that favorably lead to our existence), some of the creatures have breathed our air, drank our water and eaten our animals and people, exposing them to unknown modern diseases and even possibly taken “waste†material back to the past, possibly impacting other creatures in the food chain and, of course, Cutter and others have gone into the anomalies and tramped around causing untold “damage†to history.
Sticking a camera or scientific measuring equipment on a pole and pushing it into the anomaly to collect data is far less intrusive and would surely be irresistible. No one even bothered to look at what was on the other side of the anomalies in episodes 2 and 5. What does that say for the writers’ ability to create realistic characters with realistic motivations?
I enjoy watching Primeval, but these are things that need to be worked on next series.
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